Reading comments on websites is kind of like watching fringe channels that traffic in conspiracy theories. There’s a lot to wade through that is at best a waste of time, but if you persevere you will eventually find information of great interest that cannot be found anywhere else.
If you want to control what people see and what people learn, that is a threat. Comments must go.
Each of these incidents had one thing in common: comments posted introduced readers to information that was inconvenient. In Yahoo’s case, comments leaned conservative, and almost always exposed the article’s lies, omissions, distortions, and bias. Six months later, Yahoo’s temporary ban is still in force.
Now another right-of-center online source of news and analysis, American Thinker, has also disabled its comments section. In a post on January 14, the editor wrote: “It is news to almost nobody who reads American Thinker that a political witch hunt is underway. Parties in and out of government are looking for excuses to suppress and destroy voices that oppose the left. Because AT lacks the ability to monitor comments in real time, and because our position that comments are a forum, not something we publish, is being called into question, we can no longer publish comments.”
It is true that comments are often offensive. But how the tech companies that enable hosting and ad revenue choose which websites to intimidate is selective, either driven by leftwing bias within companies like Google and Amazon, or driven by complaint mobs that the Left is very good at organizing and targeting. If you have any doubt that enforcement is selective, just read the comments on DailyKos articles. For that matter, read the comments on Washington Post articles. They don’t hold back. They don’t get banned, either.
Ultimately what the establishment fears is open forums that lead to shifts in what is “acceptable political discourse.” An article published in July 2019 by the BBC made the establishment position embarrassingly plain on the threat represented by right-of-center narratives, writing that “The more mainstream these narratives become, the greater the tension will be over whether they really are extreme or whether they represent acceptable political discourse, and the views of a substantial number of real people.”
Comments on websites, like posts and videos, are protected speech. Just as platforms where people add posts and videos enjoy Section 230 immunity from liability for the content of those posts and videos, the website forums where comments are made are entitled to the same immunity. Unfortunately, big tech and their mobs of online warriors are seeing to it these forums are shut down anyway, one by one.
This is yet another front in the battle to preserve online free speech. Perhaps at the least, the Right needs to organize its own complaint mobs!
The destruction of Parler by Google, Apple, and Amazon is a harbinger for what is to come. The sad reality, moreover, is that the tech giants have still used only a fraction of their power. Manipulating search results, throttling up or down various Tweets or Facebook posts or YouTube videos, even deplatforming, was only the prelude. Now it has been shown that the tech companies are willing to deny hosting services.
As discussed in a useful article published by ZD Net, a website that covers technology business, there are only a handful of hosting and cloud providers that have the capacity to host large websites. Amazon is one of the biggest, and as Parler CEO John Matze has acknowledged, the other big hosting services are reluctant to defy Amazon and accept Parler’s business.
This should surprise nobody. It is not merely the management of tech companies that are determined to silence the American Right. The workforces of these companies are typically more activist than their bosses, and as well these companies are under pressure from powerful leftist nonprofits. Any major provider that accepts business from Parler will be targeted, and they know it. Why bother?
What this means should be clear to every other online property that caters to right-wing content creators. If you get too big, you will need serious technical support from very large service providers, and you are not going to get it. This means there is a ceiling on how much alternative platforms can grow. BitChute and Rumble, which are growing fast, could easily hit this wall.
Moreover, even if alternative platforms innovate with models such as Napster which essentially decentralized the servers onto millions of client machines, there are other ways that big tech can attack them. The ISPs can ban the transmission of specific URLs using automated algorithms. It is even possible that the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) can create a blacklist of URLs, refusing to recognize them and preventing their ability to operate on the internet. And of course as we’ve already seen, every major financial institution from PayPal to Chase can cancel the accounts of individuals and businesses that traffic in right-wing content.
This week Big Tech served notice to the American Right: We are going to keep you on the run, we are going to limit your audiences, we are going to keep you small and we are going to watch everything you do. We are going to do everything in our power to prevent you from getting your message to millions of people.
Among the many tragic implications of this virtual lockdown is the fact that alternative media has become the only place to find balance. The American news media is awash in propaganda. It is sickening.
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https://winston84.com/wp-content/uploads/Parler-LOGO-lg.jpg400400Edward Ringhttps://winston84.com/wp-content/uploads/logotext_v4_280x50.pngEdward Ring2021-01-13 11:49:322021-07-15 07:15:50Parler is Dead
The sad events of January 6 have provided Big Tech another excuse to ramp up their censorship. For example, the next day, YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki announced new policies for the video platform, explaining they would apply a “strike” and temporary account suspension for anyone posting a “false claim,” and that with three strikes accounts would be permanently removed.
Notably, Wojcicki did not restrict this new policy to election fraud. Any “false claim,” from election fraud to a doctor talking about alternative therapies to treat COVID-19, or whatever, is subject to the new policy. Bear in mind the thin, often imperceptible line between fact and opinion, and the significance of what YouTube has done is magnified.
But censorship is busting out all over. Facebook and Twitter have both just banned President Trump’s accounts. If these platforms, which still attract the vast majority of social media users in America, can ban the President of the United States, they can ban anyone. For anything.
These high profile acts of censorship mask more subtle operations on lesser known victims. Earlier this week we marveled at YouTube’s tolerance of an interview with Catherine Austin Fitts, a financial entrepreneur and former high ranking official with HUD. Fitts offered dystopian but informative thoughts on where the world is headed, in a 48 minute interview that covered the topics of economic authoritarianism, the future of the U.S. dollar, transhumanism, global elites, and – gasp – how the COVID pandemic is providing an excuse to institute controls necessary to convert the planet from democratic processes to technocracy.
Between 12/22/2020 and 1/06/2021, the video earned nearly 3.0 million views.
And then it was gone.
Nothing Fitts had to say ought to be forbidden speech. The fact that it was taken down just raises Fitts credibility, at the same time as it fuels conspiracy theories, because there is no reasonable explanation for why YouTube would unilaterally disable a video with content that appears to be nothing more than harmless speculation.
This particular YouTube interview could not be found elsewhere. But Fitts does have a robust presence on alternative platforms. Find much of the same topics being explored by Fitts by entering her name into the search box on BitChute. Decide for yourself if her thoughts ought to be cancelled by the Big Tech overlords.
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https://winston84.com/wp-content/uploads/YouTube-censorship-notification.jpg526526Edward Ringhttps://winston84.com/wp-content/uploads/logotext_v4_280x50.pngEdward Ring2021-01-08 13:11:482021-07-15 07:15:50YouTube Escalates War on Free Speech
The beauty of the internet, at least so far, is that even amid cancelation mobs and implacable algorithms, we still see extremely transgressive videos slip through. One of those videos is a 48 minute interview with Catherine Austin Fitts, posted on YouTube on December 22, 2020. In barely two weeks, it has already been watched 2.4 million times. YouTube censors, where are you?
Fitts, a former high ranking official with HUD, then a financial entrepreneur, leads off by explaining that the world is moving into a new era of economic totalitarianism. She observes that the wealth of the world is becoming more and more concentrated into nations with advanced technology, and within those nations, disproportionately to a small elite. She claims the COVID pandemic is providing an excuse to institute controls necessary to convert the planet from democratic processes to technocracy.
According to Fitts, in 1995, as neoliberal ideology took hold in both political parties in the U.S., the decision was made to transfer most of the wealth out of the country. This is the hollowing out that Trump’s populism attempted to reverse. But now, with the process nearly complete, Pitt alleges the pandemic is the cover whereby the unsustainable financial situation in the United States – because it was hollowed out – can be “reset.” As she puts it, “every implication of the financial coup can be explained by the magic virus.”
But Fitts is just getting warmed up. She then says the virus is being used as the means to compel mass vaccine injections that will make it possible to digitally identify and track every person. These biometric markers will then be used to connect people to a new cyber currency, allowing complete control. She believes there are five sectors working in tandem to create this new world order:
(1) Technology industry building clouds.
(2) Military doing space development.
(3) Big pharma developing injections to modify human DNA.
(4) Media providing propaganda.
(5) Central bankers engineering a new crypto system of global currency.
These are the sorts of conspiracy theories that got dozens of prominent channels representing the Q collective thrown off YouTube back in October 2020. Fitts, because she isn’t talking about satanic cults and global pedophile rings, will see her words last a little longer before the censors come for her. But while her content is less salacious, it is dealing with subjects – also plumbed by the Q investigators – that are equally troubling and far more central to our global economic destiny.
What Fitts is describing is a dark version of futurism. Her perspective is negative, but lucid. Technology makes it much easier for a small group of people to get together and become very powerful. But why? Fitts offers a logical answer:
“If technology can make it possible for people to live 150 years, and it isn’t possible to keep this a secret, then why not downsize the population, integrate robots, and you can have a very wealthy and luxurious life without the management headaches?” In one particularly chilling quote, Fitts says “I was having a conversation with a venture capitalist, billionaire type, and he looked at me with these amazingly dead eyes and said ‘I can take every company and completely automate it with software and robotics and fire all the humans. We don’t need them any more.'”
Watch this video while you still can. Some of the ideas and allegations may stretch credulity, but nonetheless are essential concepts for anyone trying to make sense of where we may be headed as a civilization.
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https://winston84.com/wp-content/uploads/Catherine-Austin-Fitts-orig-image.jpg400400Edward Ringhttps://winston84.com/wp-content/uploads/logotext_v4_280x50.pngEdward Ring2021-01-04 22:29:212021-07-15 07:15:50“Planet Lockdown” – An Interview With Catherine Austin Fitts
Thanks to suggestions from our viewers, we have added three more suppressed platforms to the Winston84 directory.
The first of these, and long overdue for inclusion, is the Gateway Pundit, edited by Jim Hoft and active since 2004. The Gateway Pundit has a U.S. Alexa rank of 104, making it one of the most heavily trafficked websites in America. It’s easy to see why, its home page is updated with a dozen or more articles per day with news that can’t be found on the mainstream platforms. There are already plenty of Free Speech Ally websites in our directory that do the same, and Gateway Pundit is as good as any. Before diving deeper into the rabbit hole, check these sites to find out what David Muir, Norah O’Donnell, and all the rest of the useless corporate media drones ignore.
For a site kicked off Facebook in 2019, and subsequently subject to one Facebook’s most aggressive campaigns to eliminate any links to it even in Facebook comments, visit Natural News, edited by Mike Adams. Earlier this year, and about a year after Facebook banned Natural News, Vox – one of the most biased (and uncensored) websites in the English language – published an article bemoaning the refusal of Natural News to go away, dubbing it “a hub for climate change deniers and anti-vaxxers.” That alone makes it worth including. Not because everything the anti-vaxxers or climate skeptics have to say is always accurate, but because they offer a valuable counter-perspective, and have the right to express their point of view.
To go deep, deep into the rabbit hole, visit the website of the always interesting Lame Cherry. An examination of Lame Cherry’s prolific output suggests the website is a cross between Alex Jones, the National Enquirer, and Maxim. The author, who is anonymous, appears to have an endearing and total indifference to whether or not they offend anyone. If you want to rummage through an eclectic and articulate mix of reports on topics that include alien UFOs, orbiting beam weapons, anti-matter, election fraud, speculation regarding the recent incident in Nashville, and instructions on how to build a pizza oven, Lame Cherry is for you. And remember, as with Alex Jones, it is likely that sprinkled amid the hyperbole and conjecture are facts you will not find anywhere else.
We thank our viewers for suggestions and tips. Please keep them coming.
Probably one of the deadliest minefields, among all categories of suppressed discourse, is to venture into the topic of transsexuals with anything apart from absolute adherence to the politically correct perspective. Rather than do that, we’d just like to draw attention to the work of 4thWaveNow, a website and Twitter account that bills itself as “youth transition skeptics.”
It took some digging, but it appears that “4th Wave Now” is how the site’s authors assert their embrace of “4th wave feminism,” as opposed to being labeled “TERFs,” which stands for “trans-exclusionary radical feminists.” While most of us on the Right believe identity politics is a massive distraction designed to occupy the minds of people who might otherwise pay attention to things like, oh, say, the loss of American sovereignty or the consolidation of political and economic power by a globalist oligarchy or the increasing irrelevancy of the Bill of Rights, for leftists, identity politics are of paramount importance. And to be fair, in the case of transsexuals, when someone is contemplating a medical procedure as profound as sex reassignment, how they define their “identity” is indeed consequential.
But that’s the point of this brave website, operated by an avowed leftist, who has had their Twitter account repeatedly censored, and was banned from Medium, for straying ever so slightly from the agenda of mainstream transsexual approved thought. Or as they put it: “A community of people who question the medicalization of gender-atypical youth.”
In plain English – and this will undoubtedly get some nuance wrong – this website is providing a forum for people who question the prevailing medical bias towards rapid diagnosis of young children not only with gender dysphoria, but also towards irreversible medical treatments designed to “confirm” the new sex of the patient.
This website probably would be censored more if they posted more often and had more visitors. Consider the price paid by other dutiful leftists such as JK Rowling, who by merely questioning the approved narrative of the transsexual community has been dubbed an “aggressive biological essentialist” along with the more intelligible stigma, “transphobe.” JK Rowling is going to be harassed for the rest of her life.
In the context of free speech and online censorship, which is the point of including 4thWaveNow in the Winston84 directory, one must reflect on how slight their violations were to nonetheless invite such a heavy response from Twitter. Trans activism, like so much on the Left, is intolerant in the extreme, and yet it informs the censorship policies of the major online platforms.
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https://winston84.com/wp-content/uploads/W84iOrig-4thWaveNow.jpg400400Edward Ringhttps://winston84.com/wp-content/uploads/logotext_v4_280x50.pngEdward Ring2020-12-28 12:44:072021-07-15 07:15:50Online Censorship of “Transition Skeptics”
On December 16, Attorney Jesse Binnall testified before the U.S. Congress on what his team alleges were instances of voter fraud in Nevada. His five minute testimony is packed with details; it is a must-watch video for anyone wanting to learn more about what may have really happened during the 2020 presidential election, not only in Nevada, but across America.
Apparently YouTube agreed. Click here to get the message “This video has been removed for violating YouTube’s Community Guidelines.”
What guidelines?
Online videos of Binnall’s testimony can still be found, undoubtedly with suppressed views, on the Facebook page of the Nevada Republican Party, as well as probably on this C-Span archive if you’re willing to rut around until you find it, and even HERE – get this, on a sparsely viewed YouTube channel – 116 subscribers – called “Jazz Rock Fusion & Synthesizer Music.” Apparently this lover of music loves freedom as well, because this is the channel’s only political video among scores of soundscapes and jams and assorted tunes. Thank you!
Binnall’s road to the U.S. Senate passed through the courthouses of Nevada, where the cards were stacked and rigged against his team at every stage, from factfinding to getting a fair hearing. Here’s a transcript of Binnall and his team’s Nevada appearance before a Nevada judge on December 3. But what was a labored, obstructed and ultimately fruitless effort in Nevada was distilled into five minutes of some of the most damning testimony you will every hear on December 16 before a U.S. Senate committee.
Which is why YouTube banned it back when it was hot, back when it was going viral. This is a key strategy of online censors today – they stamp out the fire when it’s hot and spreading fast, but they let the embers of truth burn on the obscure sites and platforms. If a fire ever reaches critical mass, they turn back on the fire hose. And sadly, it’s working.
For those who won’t forget, or who don’t want to pretend that nothing happened, find these embers of truth. Find these source videos. And find the transcripts. A transcript of Binnall’s testimony can also be found on an official U.S. Senate website, but only in the less searchable PDF format. For that reason, Binnall’s five minute’s of remarks, in their entirety, are written here:
Jesse Binnall’s Opening Statement – U.S. Senate Hearing on Election Fraud – December 16, 2020:
Thank you Mr. Chairman, Ranking Member Peters, and members of the committee.
This year thousands upon thousands of Nevada voters had their voices canceled out by election fraud and invalid ballots. Here’s how it happened:
On August 3, 2020, after a rushed special session, Nevada legislators made drastic changes to the state’s election law by adopting a bill known as AB 4. The vulnerabilities of this bill were obvious. It provided for universal mail in voting without sufficient safeguards to authenticate voters or ensure the fundamental requirement that only one ballot was sent to each legally qualified voter. This was aggravated by election officials’ failure to clean known deficiencies in their voter rolls.
Because of AB 4, the number of mailed ballots rocketed from about 70,000 in 2016 to over 690,000 this year. The election was inevitably riddled with fraud and our hotline never stopped ringing. While the media and the Democrats accused us of making it all up our team began chasing down every lead. Our evidence came both from data scientists and from brave whistleblowers. Here’s what we found:
Over 42,000 people voted more than once. Our experts were able to make this determination by reviewing the list of actual voters and comparing it to other voters with the same name, address, and date of birth. This method was also able to catch people using different variations of their first name such as William and Bill and individuals who registered both under a married name and a maiden name.
At least 1,500 dead people are recorded as voting as shown by comparing the list of mail voters with the Social Security death records.
More than 19,000 people voted, even though they didn’t live in Nevada. This does not include military voters or students. These voters were identified by comparing the list of voters with the US Postal Service’s National Change of Address database, among other sources.
About 8,000 people voted from non-existent addresses. Here we cross-reference voters with the coding accuracy support system [CASS], which allowed our experts to identify undeliverable addresses.
Over 15,000 votes were cast from commercial or vacant addresses. Our experts found these voters by analyzing official US Postal Service records that flag non-residential addresses and addresses vacant for more than 90 days.
Incredibly, almost 4,000 non-citizens also voted as determined by comparing official DMV records of non-citizens to the list of actual voters in the2020 election.
The list goes on. All in all, our experts identified 130,000 unique instances of voter fraud in Nevada, but the actual numbers are almost certainly higher. Our data scientists made these calculations not by estimations or statistical sampling, but by analyzing and comparing the list of actual voters with other lists, most of which are publicly available.
To put it simply, they explain their methods, so others can check their work. Our evidence has never been refuted, only ignored.
Two Clark County Technical employees came forward, completely independent of each other, and explained that they discovered that the number of votes recorded by voting machines and stored on USB drives would change between the time the polls were closed at night and when they were reopened the next morning. In other words, votes were literally appearing and disappearing in the dead of night.
When we attempted to verify the integrity of these voting machines, we were only allowed a useless visual inspection of the outside a USB drive. We were denied a forensic examination.
Finally, our investigation also uncovered a campaign to illegally incentivize votes from marginalized populations, by requiring people to prove that they voted in order to receive raffle tickets for gift cards, televisions, and more.
Our determined team verified these irregularities without any of the tools of law enforcement such as grand jury, subpoenas, or FBI agents. Instead, we had less than a month using critical thinking and elbow grease to compile our evidence. We tried to obtain testimony or documents from Clark County officials, but they obstructed and stonewalled. When we filed suit, state officials and even courts delayed proceedings for days, but then offered us merely hours to brief and argue our cases.
In wrapping up Mr. Chairman, these findings are disturbing, alarming, and unacceptable in a free society. Our free and fair election tradition is a precious treasure that we are charged with protecting. Government by the consent of the governed is hard to win and easy to lose. Every single time a fraudulent or illegal vote is cast, the vote of an honest citizen is canceled out. Thank you.
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https://winston84.com/wp-content/uploads/Jesse-Binnall-orig-image.jpg400400Edward Ringhttps://winston84.com/wp-content/uploads/logotext_v4_280x50.pngEdward Ring2020-12-26 21:15:422021-07-15 07:15:50YouTube Censors U.S. Senate Testimony on Voter Fraud in Nevada
RedPill78, a “citizen journalist” operating in Washington DC, was banned from YouTube back in October. That was part of the coordinated assault by big tech on the so-called QAnon journalists. But QAnon is an inexact term, used by the establishment to push dissident journalists into a box: “Conspiracy theorists (as if conspiracies don’t exist) who think the Democratic party has been taken over by satanic, baby-eating pedophiles.”
This is a gross mischaracterization, designed to discourage anyone from paying attention to the work of the Q collective.
What RedPill78, and tens of thousands of citizen journalists like him are part of is better described as a digital army. They are a threat to the establishment because they are doing investigative work that controlled mainstream journalists in America have neither the time nor the permission to conduct.
For now, RedPill78 has not been silenced, because he has migrated to Rumble, DLive, Pilled, Odysee, and others. Alternative, constantly proliferating video platforms working on distributed servers, theoretically, can continue to broadcast online unless the whole internet is shut down. To take them down, that is, you might have to take down everything.
There are many ways the empire can strike back, however, and kicking dissidents off of the major video platforms is only one of them.
On December 17, in the middle of a live show, RedPill78 learned that PayPal had terminated his account. Without providing examples of how his content had transgressed, and providing only innocuous, vague explanation, PayPal took away RedPill78’s ability to accept donations or subscription payments.
This represents a major escalation in the ongoing assault on free speech, and like video deplatforming, it is being rolled out slowly but systematically. What RedPill78 has experienced is just the beginning. Laura Loomer has been banned from riding Uber, solely because of her political opinions. Lana Lokteff has been banned from having any bank accounts, again solely because of her political opinions.
None of these victims of financial deplatforming have violated First Amendment principles. “Hate speech” and “misinformation,” besides being highly subjective concepts, are protected forms of speech. If you listen to RedPill78’s body of work, there is nothing to justify censorship, much less financial aggression.
RedPill78 is a threat because he is investigating fraud and corruption, and connecting the dots. Listen to his findings. See for yourself how close he and others are getting to truths, which if spread far and wide, could be very inconvenient for America’s ruling class.
The Federal Office of Comptroller of the Currency is considering a new rule that would bar banks from denying service for non-financial reasons, such as a customer’s political views. This could be implemented without approval of the U.S. Congress, but could be rescinded if Biden takes over the executive branch.
The Leftist dominated establishment should be careful what it wishes for. The instruments of repression they are perfecting with their big tech allies could be used against them, if enough Americans take the Red Pill.
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https://winston84.com/wp-content/uploads/W84iOrig-RedPill78.jpg400400Edward Ringhttps://winston84.com/wp-content/uploads/logotext_v4_280x50.pngEdward Ring2020-12-20 13:19:112021-07-15 07:15:50Payment Processers Escalate War on Digital Army
YouTube has announced new policies aimed at “limiting the reach of borderline content” and to “protect people from problematic content that doesn’t violate our community guidelines.” Got that? They’re figuring out how to “protect” people from content that does not violate their guidelines.
The recent announcements come in the context of reporting on the 2020 election. One of YouTube’s principal tools is their choice of “recommended videos,” about which they boast “the top 10 authoritative news channels were recommended over 14X more than the top 10 non-authoritative channels on election-related content.”
As for these “authoritative channels, YouTube has chosen CBS, ABC, NBC, CNN, and Fox. Because those news sources do serious investigative reporting, leave nothing out, and are entirely objective.
YouTube has already been doing a very good job at limiting the reach of “problematic” content, but they’re determined to crush dissenting content completely. Quoting from YouTube Insider, “while problematic misinformation represents a fraction of 1% of what’s watched on YouTube in the U.S., we know we can bring that number down even more.”
And to “bring down that number even more,” as of December 9, YouTube “will start removing any piece of content uploaded today (or anytime after) that misleads people by alleging that widespread fraud or errors changed the outcome of the 2020 U.S. Presidential election, in line with our approach towards historical U.S. Presidential election.”
But hold on. Widespread fraud or errors very likely did change the outcome of the 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. Why not allow an open debate and presentation of the facts?
To get two very different interpretations of what YouTube has done, listen to Jeremy Hambly, on BitChute, and read Taylor Hatmaker, on TechCrunch. Hambly is understandably upset that YouTube has already deleted more than 8,000 channels that had spread “misleading” information about the election between September and mid-December 2020, yet is turning their canceling action up a notch. Hatmaker, on the other hand, and like so many millions in the United States, does not recognize fascism even now that it’s in the open and poised to seize absolute power. Hatmaker thinks YouTube is doing too little, too late.
Hambly, with over 1.0 million subscribers on YouTube, is hedging his bets. His videos are now disbursed across multiple platforms including BitChute, Rumble, and Odysee. And every time YouTube silences another voice, these alternative platforms gain viewers. But with YouTube still commanding 90 percent of the U.S. digital video market, what they decide people can and cannot see has a decisive impact on how millions of Americans form opinions and vote.
An ongoing public debate over the impact of fraud on the outcome of the 2020 election would be healthy. But to the extent that debate occurs, it will be done on alterative media. And whether or not fraud actually did change the outcome of the 2020 election, swing voters were already decisively manipulated by the actions of YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Google search, and every one of the “authoritative news channels.”
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https://winston84.com/wp-content/uploads/YouTubeLOGO.jpg400400Edward Ringhttps://winston84.com/wp-content/uploads/logotext_v4_280x50.pngEdward Ring2020-12-13 17:05:352021-07-15 07:15:50YouTube Escalates Crackdown on Alternative Content Creators
Every time you view a post on Facebook or Twitter with a “warning” message of any kind, know you are living through times that we watched with horror happen in other nations, but now are witnessing right here.
And then there are the accounts that Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and others, along with crowdfunding sites and payment processors, simply cancel. This is the reason the Winston84 directory exists. Our mission is to report on the new platforms arising to cope with censorship, and provide profiles of banned content providers that show where they can still be found.
When finding people to add to Winston84, we error on the side of inclusion. But there should be no controversy whatsoever with respect to Lin Wood and his #FightBack Foundation. Wood is a respected attorney whose clients have included Nicholas Sandmann, Carter Page, Dr. Simone Gold, Mark and Patricia McCloskey, Mike Lindell, and many, many others. If you view his website, you find nothing remotely hyperbolic or offensive.
But nonetheless when you click on his Facebook account you get a message “This Page Isn’t Available,” and when you click on his Twitter account, at least as of 12/12/2020, you get a message “Caution: This account is temporarily restricted.” Even his Parler account, inexplicably, will not load. If that’s deliberate, bad move.
On all our profiles, we leave in place the deplatformed links so viewers can see the extent of the censorship. And it is getting worse, systematically. There is no reason whatsoever that Lin Wood should be getting deplatformed.
When the internet began it enabled unprecedented ability for content creators to inexpensively reach millions of people. A little over a decade later, social media’s capacity for viral proliferation of information online took that ability to an even more unprecedented level. And then the clampdown began. Today, big tech is coopted by establishment media and corrupt special interests within the federal government. There are things they don’t want us to know, and they’re trying to put the genie back in the bottle.
The good news is they’ll never succeed in lulling literally hundreds of millions of Americans back to sleep. Their actions during the pandemic and during the presidential election have not denied, but increased the credibility of those who have been warning for years about online censorship.
Additional good news is the fact that censorship by the big platforms is stimulating rapid innovation in online communications. The information war has just begun.
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https://winston84.com/wp-content/uploads/W84iOrig-FightBack.jpg400400Edward Ringhttps://winston84.com/wp-content/uploads/logotext_v4_280x50.pngEdward Ring2020-12-12 10:50:302021-07-15 07:15:50Lin Wood’s #FightBack Blocked from Facebook and Twitter
American Thinker Disables Comments Section
/1 Comment/in News, Winston84 /by Edward RingReading comments on websites is kind of like watching fringe channels that traffic in conspiracy theories. There’s a lot to wade through that is at best a waste of time, but if you persevere you will eventually find information of great interest that cannot be found anywhere else.
If you want to control what people see and what people learn, that is a threat. Comments must go.
This is why back in June 2020 The Federalist was forced to disable its comments section in order to keep Google ads. At the same time, Google banned ZeroHedge outright, taking away their ad revenue, alleging “racist” comments on the website. The following month, Yahoo News “temporarily” disabled its comments section.
Each of these incidents had one thing in common: comments posted introduced readers to information that was inconvenient. In Yahoo’s case, comments leaned conservative, and almost always exposed the article’s lies, omissions, distortions, and bias. Six months later, Yahoo’s temporary ban is still in force.
Now another right-of-center online source of news and analysis, American Thinker, has also disabled its comments section. In a post on January 14, the editor wrote: “It is news to almost nobody who reads American Thinker that a political witch hunt is underway. Parties in and out of government are looking for excuses to suppress and destroy voices that oppose the left. Because AT lacks the ability to monitor comments in real time, and because our position that comments are a forum, not something we publish, is being called into question, we can no longer publish comments.”
It is true that comments are often offensive. But how the tech companies that enable hosting and ad revenue choose which websites to intimidate is selective, either driven by leftwing bias within companies like Google and Amazon, or driven by complaint mobs that the Left is very good at organizing and targeting. If you have any doubt that enforcement is selective, just read the comments on DailyKos articles. For that matter, read the comments on Washington Post articles. They don’t hold back. They don’t get banned, either.
Ultimately what the establishment fears is open forums that lead to shifts in what is “acceptable political discourse.” An article published in July 2019 by the BBC made the establishment position embarrassingly plain on the threat represented by right-of-center narratives, writing that “The more mainstream these narratives become, the greater the tension will be over whether they really are extreme or whether they represent acceptable political discourse, and the views of a substantial number of real people.”
Comments on websites, like posts and videos, are protected speech. Just as platforms where people add posts and videos enjoy Section 230 immunity from liability for the content of those posts and videos, the website forums where comments are made are entitled to the same immunity. Unfortunately, big tech and their mobs of online warriors are seeing to it these forums are shut down anyway, one by one.
This is yet another front in the battle to preserve online free speech. Perhaps at the least, the Right needs to organize its own complaint mobs!
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Parler is Dead
/2 Comments/in News, Winston84 /by Edward RingThe destruction of Parler by Google, Apple, and Amazon is a harbinger for what is to come. The sad reality, moreover, is that the tech giants have still used only a fraction of their power. Manipulating search results, throttling up or down various Tweets or Facebook posts or YouTube videos, even deplatforming, was only the prelude. Now it has been shown that the tech companies are willing to deny hosting services.
As discussed in a useful article published by ZD Net, a website that covers technology business, there are only a handful of hosting and cloud providers that have the capacity to host large websites. Amazon is one of the biggest, and as Parler CEO John Matze has acknowledged, the other big hosting services are reluctant to defy Amazon and accept Parler’s business.
This should surprise nobody. It is not merely the management of tech companies that are determined to silence the American Right. The workforces of these companies are typically more activist than their bosses, and as well these companies are under pressure from powerful leftist nonprofits. Any major provider that accepts business from Parler will be targeted, and they know it. Why bother?
What this means should be clear to every other online property that caters to right-wing content creators. If you get too big, you will need serious technical support from very large service providers, and you are not going to get it. This means there is a ceiling on how much alternative platforms can grow. BitChute and Rumble, which are growing fast, could easily hit this wall.
Moreover, even if alternative platforms innovate with models such as Napster which essentially decentralized the servers onto millions of client machines, there are other ways that big tech can attack them. The ISPs can ban the transmission of specific URLs using automated algorithms. It is even possible that the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) can create a blacklist of URLs, refusing to recognize them and preventing their ability to operate on the internet. And of course as we’ve already seen, every major financial institution from PayPal to Chase can cancel the accounts of individuals and businesses that traffic in right-wing content.
This week Big Tech served notice to the American Right: We are going to keep you on the run, we are going to limit your audiences, we are going to keep you small and we are going to watch everything you do. We are going to do everything in our power to prevent you from getting your message to millions of people.
Among the many tragic implications of this virtual lockdown is the fact that alternative media has become the only place to find balance. The American news media is awash in propaganda. It is sickening.
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YouTube Escalates War on Free Speech
/3 Comments/in News, Winston84 /by Edward RingThe sad events of January 6 have provided Big Tech another excuse to ramp up their censorship. For example, the next day, YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki announced new policies for the video platform, explaining they would apply a “strike” and temporary account suspension for anyone posting a “false claim,” and that with three strikes accounts would be permanently removed.
Notably, Wojcicki did not restrict this new policy to election fraud. Any “false claim,” from election fraud to a doctor talking about alternative therapies to treat COVID-19, or whatever, is subject to the new policy. Bear in mind the thin, often imperceptible line between fact and opinion, and the significance of what YouTube has done is magnified.
But censorship is busting out all over. Facebook and Twitter have both just banned President Trump’s accounts. If these platforms, which still attract the vast majority of social media users in America, can ban the President of the United States, they can ban anyone. For anything.
These high profile acts of censorship mask more subtle operations on lesser known victims. Earlier this week we marveled at YouTube’s tolerance of an interview with Catherine Austin Fitts, a financial entrepreneur and former high ranking official with HUD. Fitts offered dystopian but informative thoughts on where the world is headed, in a 48 minute interview that covered the topics of economic authoritarianism, the future of the U.S. dollar, transhumanism, global elites, and – gasp – how the COVID pandemic is providing an excuse to institute controls necessary to convert the planet from democratic processes to technocracy.
Between 12/22/2020 and 1/06/2021, the video earned nearly 3.0 million views.
And then it was gone.
Nothing Fitts had to say ought to be forbidden speech. The fact that it was taken down just raises Fitts credibility, at the same time as it fuels conspiracy theories, because there is no reasonable explanation for why YouTube would unilaterally disable a video with content that appears to be nothing more than harmless speculation.
This particular YouTube interview could not be found elsewhere. But Fitts does have a robust presence on alternative platforms. Find much of the same topics being explored by Fitts by entering her name into the search box on BitChute. Decide for yourself if her thoughts ought to be cancelled by the Big Tech overlords.
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“Planet Lockdown” – An Interview With Catherine Austin Fitts
/2 Comments/in News, Winston84 /by Edward RingThe beauty of the internet, at least so far, is that even amid cancelation mobs and implacable algorithms, we still see extremely transgressive videos slip through. One of those videos is a 48 minute interview with Catherine Austin Fitts, posted on YouTube on December 22, 2020. In barely two weeks, it has already been watched 2.4 million times. YouTube censors, where are you?
Fitts, a former high ranking official with HUD, then a financial entrepreneur, leads off by explaining that the world is moving into a new era of economic totalitarianism. She observes that the wealth of the world is becoming more and more concentrated into nations with advanced technology, and within those nations, disproportionately to a small elite. She claims the COVID pandemic is providing an excuse to institute controls necessary to convert the planet from democratic processes to technocracy.
According to Fitts, in 1995, as neoliberal ideology took hold in both political parties in the U.S., the decision was made to transfer most of the wealth out of the country. This is the hollowing out that Trump’s populism attempted to reverse. But now, with the process nearly complete, Pitt alleges the pandemic is the cover whereby the unsustainable financial situation in the United States – because it was hollowed out – can be “reset.” As she puts it, “every implication of the financial coup can be explained by the magic virus.”
But Fitts is just getting warmed up. She then says the virus is being used as the means to compel mass vaccine injections that will make it possible to digitally identify and track every person. These biometric markers will then be used to connect people to a new cyber currency, allowing complete control. She believes there are five sectors working in tandem to create this new world order:
(1) Technology industry building clouds.
(2) Military doing space development.
(3) Big pharma developing injections to modify human DNA.
(4) Media providing propaganda.
(5) Central bankers engineering a new crypto system of global currency.
These are the sorts of conspiracy theories that got dozens of prominent channels representing the Q collective thrown off YouTube back in October 2020. Fitts, because she isn’t talking about satanic cults and global pedophile rings, will see her words last a little longer before the censors come for her. But while her content is less salacious, it is dealing with subjects – also plumbed by the Q investigators – that are equally troubling and far more central to our global economic destiny.
What Fitts is describing is a dark version of futurism. Her perspective is negative, but lucid. Technology makes it much easier for a small group of people to get together and become very powerful. But why? Fitts offers a logical answer:
“If technology can make it possible for people to live 150 years, and it isn’t possible to keep this a secret, then why not downsize the population, integrate robots, and you can have a very wealthy and luxurious life without the management headaches?” In one particularly chilling quote, Fitts says “I was having a conversation with a venture capitalist, billionaire type, and he looked at me with these amazingly dead eyes and said ‘I can take every company and completely automate it with software and robotics and fire all the humans. We don’t need them any more.'”
Watch this video while you still can. Some of the ideas and allegations may stretch credulity, but nonetheless are essential concepts for anyone trying to make sense of where we may be headed as a civilization.
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W84 Adds Gateway Pundit, Natural News, and Lame Cherry
/1 Comment/in News, Winston84 /by Edward RingThanks to suggestions from our viewers, we have added three more suppressed platforms to the Winston84 directory.
The first of these, and long overdue for inclusion, is the Gateway Pundit, edited by Jim Hoft and active since 2004. The Gateway Pundit has a U.S. Alexa rank of 104, making it one of the most heavily trafficked websites in America. It’s easy to see why, its home page is updated with a dozen or more articles per day with news that can’t be found on the mainstream platforms. There are already plenty of Free Speech Ally websites in our directory that do the same, and Gateway Pundit is as good as any. Before diving deeper into the rabbit hole, check these sites to find out what David Muir, Norah O’Donnell, and all the rest of the useless corporate media drones ignore.
For a site kicked off Facebook in 2019, and subsequently subject to one Facebook’s most aggressive campaigns to eliminate any links to it even in Facebook comments, visit Natural News, edited by Mike Adams. Earlier this year, and about a year after Facebook banned Natural News, Vox – one of the most biased (and uncensored) websites in the English language – published an article bemoaning the refusal of Natural News to go away, dubbing it “a hub for climate change deniers and anti-vaxxers.” That alone makes it worth including. Not because everything the anti-vaxxers or climate skeptics have to say is always accurate, but because they offer a valuable counter-perspective, and have the right to express their point of view.
To go deep, deep into the rabbit hole, visit the website of the always interesting Lame Cherry. An examination of Lame Cherry’s prolific output suggests the website is a cross between Alex Jones, the National Enquirer, and Maxim. The author, who is anonymous, appears to have an endearing and total indifference to whether or not they offend anyone. If you want to rummage through an eclectic and articulate mix of reports on topics that include alien UFOs, orbiting beam weapons, anti-matter, election fraud, speculation regarding the recent incident in Nashville, and instructions on how to build a pizza oven, Lame Cherry is for you. And remember, as with Alex Jones, it is likely that sprinkled amid the hyperbole and conjecture are facts you will not find anywhere else.
We thank our viewers for suggestions and tips. Please keep them coming.
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Online Censorship of “Transition Skeptics”
/1 Comment/in News, Winston84 /by Edward RingProbably one of the deadliest minefields, among all categories of suppressed discourse, is to venture into the topic of transsexuals with anything apart from absolute adherence to the politically correct perspective. Rather than do that, we’d just like to draw attention to the work of 4thWaveNow, a website and Twitter account that bills itself as “youth transition skeptics.”
It took some digging, but it appears that “4th Wave Now” is how the site’s authors assert their embrace of “4th wave feminism,” as opposed to being labeled “TERFs,” which stands for “trans-exclusionary radical feminists.” While most of us on the Right believe identity politics is a massive distraction designed to occupy the minds of people who might otherwise pay attention to things like, oh, say, the loss of American sovereignty or the consolidation of political and economic power by a globalist oligarchy or the increasing irrelevancy of the Bill of Rights, for leftists, identity politics are of paramount importance. And to be fair, in the case of transsexuals, when someone is contemplating a medical procedure as profound as sex reassignment, how they define their “identity” is indeed consequential.
But that’s the point of this brave website, operated by an avowed leftist, who has had their Twitter account repeatedly censored, and was banned from Medium, for straying ever so slightly from the agenda of mainstream transsexual approved thought. Or as they put it: “A community of people who question the medicalization of gender-atypical youth.”
In plain English – and this will undoubtedly get some nuance wrong – this website is providing a forum for people who question the prevailing medical bias towards rapid diagnosis of young children not only with gender dysphoria, but also towards irreversible medical treatments designed to “confirm” the new sex of the patient.
This website probably would be censored more if they posted more often and had more visitors. Consider the price paid by other dutiful leftists such as JK Rowling, who by merely questioning the approved narrative of the transsexual community has been dubbed an “aggressive biological essentialist” along with the more intelligible stigma, “transphobe.” JK Rowling is going to be harassed for the rest of her life.
In the context of free speech and online censorship, which is the point of including 4thWaveNow in the Winston84 directory, one must reflect on how slight their violations were to nonetheless invite such a heavy response from Twitter. Trans activism, like so much on the Left, is intolerant in the extreme, and yet it informs the censorship policies of the major online platforms.
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YouTube Censors U.S. Senate Testimony on Voter Fraud in Nevada
/2 Comments/in News, Winston84 /by Edward RingOn December 16, Attorney Jesse Binnall testified before the U.S. Congress on what his team alleges were instances of voter fraud in Nevada. His five minute testimony is packed with details; it is a must-watch video for anyone wanting to learn more about what may have really happened during the 2020 presidential election, not only in Nevada, but across America.
Apparently YouTube agreed. Click here to get the message “This video has been removed for violating YouTube’s Community Guidelines.”
What guidelines?
Online videos of Binnall’s testimony can still be found, undoubtedly with suppressed views, on the Facebook page of the Nevada Republican Party, as well as probably on this C-Span archive if you’re willing to rut around until you find it, and even HERE – get this, on a sparsely viewed YouTube channel – 116 subscribers – called “Jazz Rock Fusion & Synthesizer Music.” Apparently this lover of music loves freedom as well, because this is the channel’s only political video among scores of soundscapes and jams and assorted tunes. Thank you!
Binnall’s road to the U.S. Senate passed through the courthouses of Nevada, where the cards were stacked and rigged against his team at every stage, from factfinding to getting a fair hearing. Here’s a transcript of Binnall and his team’s Nevada appearance before a Nevada judge on December 3. But what was a labored, obstructed and ultimately fruitless effort in Nevada was distilled into five minutes of some of the most damning testimony you will every hear on December 16 before a U.S. Senate committee.
Which is why YouTube banned it back when it was hot, back when it was going viral. This is a key strategy of online censors today – they stamp out the fire when it’s hot and spreading fast, but they let the embers of truth burn on the obscure sites and platforms. If a fire ever reaches critical mass, they turn back on the fire hose. And sadly, it’s working.
For those who won’t forget, or who don’t want to pretend that nothing happened, find these embers of truth. Find these source videos. And find the transcripts. A transcript of Binnall’s testimony can also be found on an official U.S. Senate website, but only in the less searchable PDF format. For that reason, Binnall’s five minute’s of remarks, in their entirety, are written here:
Jesse Binnall’s Opening Statement – U.S. Senate Hearing on Election Fraud – December 16, 2020:
Thank you Mr. Chairman, Ranking Member Peters, and members of the committee.
This year thousands upon thousands of Nevada voters had their voices canceled out by election fraud and invalid ballots. Here’s how it happened:
On August 3, 2020, after a rushed special session, Nevada legislators made drastic changes to the state’s election law by adopting a bill known as AB 4. The vulnerabilities of this bill were obvious. It provided for universal mail in voting without sufficient safeguards to authenticate voters or ensure the fundamental requirement that only one ballot was sent to each legally qualified voter. This was aggravated by election officials’ failure to clean known deficiencies in their voter rolls.
Because of AB 4, the number of mailed ballots rocketed from about 70,000 in 2016 to over 690,000 this year. The election was inevitably riddled with fraud and our hotline never stopped ringing. While the media and the Democrats accused us of making it all up our team began chasing down every lead. Our evidence came both from data scientists and from brave whistleblowers. Here’s what we found:
Over 42,000 people voted more than once. Our experts were able to make this determination by reviewing the list of actual voters and comparing it to other voters with the same name, address, and date of birth. This method was also able to catch people using different variations of their first name such as William and Bill and individuals who registered both under a married name and a maiden name.
At least 1,500 dead people are recorded as voting as shown by comparing the list of mail voters with the Social Security death records.
More than 19,000 people voted, even though they didn’t live in Nevada. This does not include military voters or students. These voters were identified by comparing the list of voters with the US Postal Service’s National Change of Address database, among other sources.
About 8,000 people voted from non-existent addresses. Here we cross-reference voters with the coding accuracy support system [CASS], which allowed our experts to identify undeliverable addresses.
Over 15,000 votes were cast from commercial or vacant addresses. Our experts found these voters by analyzing official US Postal Service records that flag non-residential addresses and addresses vacant for more than 90 days.
Incredibly, almost 4,000 non-citizens also voted as determined by comparing official DMV records of non-citizens to the list of actual voters in the2020 election.
The list goes on. All in all, our experts identified 130,000 unique instances of voter fraud in Nevada, but the actual numbers are almost certainly higher. Our data scientists made these calculations not by estimations or statistical sampling, but by analyzing and comparing the list of actual voters with other lists, most of which are publicly available.
To put it simply, they explain their methods, so others can check their work. Our evidence has never been refuted, only ignored.
Two Clark County Technical employees came forward, completely independent of each other, and explained that they discovered that the number of votes recorded by voting machines and stored on USB drives would change between the time the polls were closed at night and when they were reopened the next morning. In other words, votes were literally appearing and disappearing in the dead of night.
When we attempted to verify the integrity of these voting machines, we were only allowed a useless visual inspection of the outside a USB drive. We were denied a forensic examination.
Finally, our investigation also uncovered a campaign to illegally incentivize votes from marginalized populations, by requiring people to prove that they voted in order to receive raffle tickets for gift cards, televisions, and more.
Our determined team verified these irregularities without any of the tools of law enforcement such as grand jury, subpoenas, or FBI agents. Instead, we had less than a month using critical thinking and elbow grease to compile our evidence. We tried to obtain testimony or documents from Clark County officials, but they obstructed and stonewalled. When we filed suit, state officials and even courts delayed proceedings for days, but then offered us merely hours to brief and argue our cases.
In wrapping up Mr. Chairman, these findings are disturbing, alarming, and unacceptable in a free society. Our free and fair election tradition is a precious treasure that we are charged with protecting. Government by the consent of the governed is hard to win and easy to lose. Every single time a fraudulent or illegal vote is cast, the vote of an honest citizen is canceled out. Thank you.
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Payment Processers Escalate War on Digital Army
/1 Comment/in News, Winston84 /by Edward RingRedPill78, a “citizen journalist” operating in Washington DC, was banned from YouTube back in October. That was part of the coordinated assault by big tech on the so-called QAnon journalists. But QAnon is an inexact term, used by the establishment to push dissident journalists into a box: “Conspiracy theorists (as if conspiracies don’t exist) who think the Democratic party has been taken over by satanic, baby-eating pedophiles.”
This is a gross mischaracterization, designed to discourage anyone from paying attention to the work of the Q collective.
What RedPill78, and tens of thousands of citizen journalists like him are part of is better described as a digital army. They are a threat to the establishment because they are doing investigative work that controlled mainstream journalists in America have neither the time nor the permission to conduct.
For now, RedPill78 has not been silenced, because he has migrated to Rumble, DLive, Pilled, Odysee, and others. Alternative, constantly proliferating video platforms working on distributed servers, theoretically, can continue to broadcast online unless the whole internet is shut down. To take them down, that is, you might have to take down everything.
There are many ways the empire can strike back, however, and kicking dissidents off of the major video platforms is only one of them.
On December 17, in the middle of a live show, RedPill78 learned that PayPal had terminated his account. Without providing examples of how his content had transgressed, and providing only innocuous, vague explanation, PayPal took away RedPill78’s ability to accept donations or subscription payments.
This represents a major escalation in the ongoing assault on free speech, and like video deplatforming, it is being rolled out slowly but systematically. What RedPill78 has experienced is just the beginning. Laura Loomer has been banned from riding Uber, solely because of her political opinions. Lana Lokteff has been banned from having any bank accounts, again solely because of her political opinions.
None of these victims of financial deplatforming have violated First Amendment principles. “Hate speech” and “misinformation,” besides being highly subjective concepts, are protected forms of speech. If you listen to RedPill78’s body of work, there is nothing to justify censorship, much less financial aggression.
RedPill78 is a threat because he is investigating fraud and corruption, and connecting the dots. Listen to his findings. See for yourself how close he and others are getting to truths, which if spread far and wide, could be very inconvenient for America’s ruling class.
The Federal Office of Comptroller of the Currency is considering a new rule that would bar banks from denying service for non-financial reasons, such as a customer’s political views. This could be implemented without approval of the U.S. Congress, but could be rescinded if Biden takes over the executive branch.
The Leftist dominated establishment should be careful what it wishes for. The instruments of repression they are perfecting with their big tech allies could be used against them, if enough Americans take the Red Pill.
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YouTube Escalates Crackdown on Alternative Content Creators
/in News, Winston84 /by Edward RingYouTube has announced new policies aimed at “limiting the reach of borderline content” and to “protect people from problematic content that doesn’t violate our community guidelines.” Got that? They’re figuring out how to “protect” people from content that does not violate their guidelines.
The recent announcements come in the context of reporting on the 2020 election. One of YouTube’s principal tools is their choice of “recommended videos,” about which they boast “the top 10 authoritative news channels were recommended over 14X more than the top 10 non-authoritative channels on election-related content.”
As for these “authoritative channels, YouTube has chosen CBS, ABC, NBC, CNN, and Fox. Because those news sources do serious investigative reporting, leave nothing out, and are entirely objective.
YouTube has already been doing a very good job at limiting the reach of “problematic” content, but they’re determined to crush dissenting content completely. Quoting from YouTube Insider, “while problematic misinformation represents a fraction of 1% of what’s watched on YouTube in the U.S., we know we can bring that number down even more.”
And to “bring down that number even more,” as of December 9, YouTube “will start removing any piece of content uploaded today (or anytime after) that misleads people by alleging that widespread fraud or errors changed the outcome of the 2020 U.S. Presidential election, in line with our approach towards historical U.S. Presidential election.”
But hold on. Widespread fraud or errors very likely did change the outcome of the 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. Why not allow an open debate and presentation of the facts?
To get two very different interpretations of what YouTube has done, listen to Jeremy Hambly, on BitChute, and read Taylor Hatmaker, on TechCrunch. Hambly is understandably upset that YouTube has already deleted more than 8,000 channels that had spread “misleading” information about the election between September and mid-December 2020, yet is turning their canceling action up a notch. Hatmaker, on the other hand, and like so many millions in the United States, does not recognize fascism even now that it’s in the open and poised to seize absolute power. Hatmaker thinks YouTube is doing too little, too late.
Hambly, with over 1.0 million subscribers on YouTube, is hedging his bets. His videos are now disbursed across multiple platforms including BitChute, Rumble, and Odysee. And every time YouTube silences another voice, these alternative platforms gain viewers. But with YouTube still commanding 90 percent of the U.S. digital video market, what they decide people can and cannot see has a decisive impact on how millions of Americans form opinions and vote.
An ongoing public debate over the impact of fraud on the outcome of the 2020 election would be healthy. But to the extent that debate occurs, it will be done on alterative media. And whether or not fraud actually did change the outcome of the 2020 election, swing voters were already decisively manipulated by the actions of YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Google search, and every one of the “authoritative news channels.”
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Lin Wood’s #FightBack Blocked from Facebook and Twitter
/in News, Winston84 /by Edward RingEvery time you view a post on Facebook or Twitter with a “warning” message of any kind, know you are living through times that we watched with horror happen in other nations, but now are witnessing right here.
And then there are the accounts that Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and others, along with crowdfunding sites and payment processors, simply cancel. This is the reason the Winston84 directory exists. Our mission is to report on the new platforms arising to cope with censorship, and provide profiles of banned content providers that show where they can still be found.
When finding people to add to Winston84, we error on the side of inclusion. But there should be no controversy whatsoever with respect to Lin Wood and his #FightBack Foundation. Wood is a respected attorney whose clients have included Nicholas Sandmann, Carter Page, Dr. Simone Gold, Mark and Patricia McCloskey, Mike Lindell, and many, many others. If you view his website, you find nothing remotely hyperbolic or offensive.
But nonetheless when you click on his Facebook account you get a message “This Page Isn’t Available,” and when you click on his Twitter account, at least as of 12/12/2020, you get a message “Caution: This account is temporarily restricted.” Even his Parler account, inexplicably, will not load. If that’s deliberate, bad move.
On all our profiles, we leave in place the deplatformed links so viewers can see the extent of the censorship. And it is getting worse, systematically. There is no reason whatsoever that Lin Wood should be getting deplatformed.
When the internet began it enabled unprecedented ability for content creators to inexpensively reach millions of people. A little over a decade later, social media’s capacity for viral proliferation of information online took that ability to an even more unprecedented level. And then the clampdown began. Today, big tech is coopted by establishment media and corrupt special interests within the federal government. There are things they don’t want us to know, and they’re trying to put the genie back in the bottle.
The good news is they’ll never succeed in lulling literally hundreds of millions of Americans back to sleep. Their actions during the pandemic and during the presidential election have not denied, but increased the credibility of those who have been warning for years about online censorship.
Additional good news is the fact that censorship by the big platforms is stimulating rapid innovation in online communications. The information war has just begun.
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